Tips for Reducing Hardware Maintenance and Network Equipment Support Costs

By Chris Wathen | September 1, 2015 | Comments Off on Tips for Reducing Hardware Maintenance and Network Equipment Support Costs

Up to 25% of a company’s total IT costs each year goes towards maintenance of IT assets. IT procurement managers are constantly on the lookout for ways to reduce and control these costs. This involves challenging tasks such as negotiating maintenance and support costs with vendors, choosing the right service, managing contracts and more.

Outsourcing to a third party service provider is one of the most efficient and effective ways to reduce costs. Over the years, we have discovered many ways to reduce costs. Here are four ways you can reduce your IT maintenance and network equipment costs.

Assess future network growth and end of support for OEM

An in-depth assessment of your business objectives and network assets can help you identify which IT components are mission critical and which are secondary. Once you have these pin pointed, look for places where you can reduce costs. Take this opportunity to plan for future network requirements and improvements.

Be proactive, not reactive

Good documentation, network and inventory mapping can help you determine the maintenance required by each component. It can also help you improve network design, selection of equipment and when you are obtaining maintenance contracts.

Analyze your existing support and maintenance contracts

As rule of thumb, when you are determining maintenance requirements, rank the devices in the order that they affect your business. High priority devices should get the highest service. Less important devices can be given reduced maintenance or no even no maintenance (especially if you use a device sparingly).

Consolidate maintenance contracts

Using a single point of contact to manage all maintenance contracts can help you simplify the determination and management of your service contracts. Don’t lock yourself into rigid multi-year vendor contracts. Look for flexible service agreements from third party service provides who can tailor make services for your needs.

To reduce network maintenance costs, it is necessary to have a holistic view. If you want to learn more about how IT managed services can help you improve your company’s bottom line and help you improve productivity, please contact KeeFORCE at (270) 366-0553.